Archives for: October 2006, 27

Quoting from my Bible study this morning: A man trying to win a woman will do anything for her. She'll call him and say, "I know it's late and you're tired, and it's raining, but could you come over and change my flat tire?" "Sure, Ill be right over," he says. And over he comes with a smile. Now fast forward. They've been married 10 yearsâ€¦She asks him to get off the couch and do something for herâ€¦He moans and groans, then she gets upset. What's happening? What was once a delight has become drudgery - because the love motivation has cooled off.

You can apply that to your marriage or your spiritual life any way you want to. I'm going to apply it to the BTD.

When I first started the BTD everything was so new and exciting. I believed it might be the answer to my long term struggle with indigestion. Indeed it was, and so much more. I was reading and studying and trying new recipes. Compliance wasn't a problem because I so clearly remembered how bad I had felt before and how great I felt now.

Now fast forward. It's been more than three years. Some of that early excitement has worn off. I'm in a comfortable routine. I'm used to feeling good, and some days I take the BTD for granted. I don't try as many new recipes. If I get busy I may skip a day of exercise or eat easy-to-prepare neutrals instead of beneficials.

If you are going to have a good marriage, you have to work to keep the love alive. If you are going to have a living relationship with Christ you have to periodically return to your first love for him. If compliance to the BTD is going to be a joy, you must remember what made it fun and exciting in the beginning.

What I especially like about this quiz is that you could agree with the premise along a spectrum, so that ticking a box in the middle translates into a sort of "I don't know, I don't care" answer, which is probably why I typed as a having a 'postmodern' world view.

"You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis."

Existentialist

69%

Postmodernist

69%

Idealist

50%

Modernist

50%

Cultural Creative

50%

Materialist

44%

Romanticist

44%

Fundamentalist

31%

Interestingly, the Blood Type Diet has been described in several articles as "The first postmodern diet."

If I remember correctly, in the Meyers Briggs world I'm something like a 'rational architect' or whatever, but I think this little quiz does a better job of putting you on the horns of a dilemma than does the MBI, which seems to just really attempt to describe you as something you probably already knew you were.

Coincidentally enough, I'm reading a little book called On Certainty by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which has a lot of interesting, aphorism-type stuff in it (in addition to some daunting philosophy and math). Right off the bat, a quote (p. 49) caught my eye and probably explains why my view of the world was such a dead-heat between existentialist and postmodernist: